Salvation of the Prodigal Knight
by SupcommMonroee
Summary: The Star Forge and its aftermath. LSMRevanxBastila. There's a chance I may end up continuing it. Possibly a bad title.


The Star Forge's vast corridors, once teeming with an army constructed from scratch and a legion of Darth Malak's most loyal and stalwart Dark Jedi minions, now resigned in idle lifelessness. Its formerly glistening halls now were but a graveyard for hundreds of droids and troops that at one point comprised the core of the colossal station's internal defenses. The corpses of Sith soldiers of all varieties littered the steel decks, and one could not take more than a single step before planting a foot through a shattered faceplate, or a sliced-open segment of chest armor, or on the severed limb of a Dark Jedi master, whose face conveyed the same shocked and pained expression its owner wore at the moment of their death.

This ocean of absolute destruction in its purest definition lay far behind Revan, now. With a calculated intent, he stepped ahead of his companions, Jolee and Juhani, onto a metal catwalk leading to the nexus of a secondary command center. Its sole occupant, Malak's new apprentice, kept her back turned to the interlopers as if to spite their very existence within her lord's sanctum.

Revan stopped halfway across the catwalk, daring Bastila Shan to turn and face him. His features displayed a rugged, purposeful expression; the pain and exhaustion that was ripping through his system screamed for every muscle in his body to surrender their struggle, but through the sheer force of single-minded dedication Revan held on, commanding his body to continue at any cost.

Bastila finally turned, shocked at how the man she once fought with had changed. On the outside, he seemed to be an unshakeable, unstoppable, and unfazeable force, but she saw past it. In his eyes, with the accuracy and precision of a predator, she identified his weariness. His overall appearance, too, betrayed his true state. His clean-shaven face was almost entirely obscured by grime, oil, and blood. His chestnut hair, dripping in spears halfway down his neck, was caked in dark crimson and cemented in sweat. Revan's simple brown robes had received similar wear and tear, exhibiting trauma, cuts, slices, bruises, and burns in every possible location. Judging from how much punishment Revan must've endured to collect that many visible wounds, Bastila felt confident that all she need to do prevail would be to outlast the adrenaline and high-grade stimulants flooding through his bloodstream.

Revan, too, took careful note of Bastila. Unlike him, her appearance was flawless. Her hair looked as if it had just been meticulously cleaned, and tied into her short signature twin ponytails. Her face possessed not a single wound or blemish, but her wry smile and golden eyes spoke volumes about just how thoroughly Malak had broken her. She withdrew her double-bladed lightsaber, and it glowed a fearsome crimson instead of her former yellow, the same as it had during their brief duel on Rakata.

"Revan - I knew you'd come for me." The Dark Lord's new apprentice spoke in a condescending tone, expressing disappointment in his dogged pursuit.

The redeemed Dark Lord somberly shook his head, withdrawing but not activating the two blades on his belt. "I'll never give up on you, Bastila. I know you can still be saved."

She found humor in this declaration. "You are wasting your time. I have seen the Jedi for what they are: weak, and afraid," Bastila clenched her free fist, further emphasizing her point, "The Sith are the true Masters of the Force. You have forgotten that lesson, Revan."

Bastila raised her chin, looking down on Revan and his partners and passing her judgement, "Now you must pay the price. Here on the Star Forge, the power of the Dark Side is at its strongest. This time you will not defeat me!"

Her words threatened to shatter his resolve. Staring into the depths of her eyes, and seeing the rage and pain boiling over, it took all of his remaining willpower to show no weakness or buckle. Memories of her before the episode aboard the _Leviathan_ were fresh and crisp within Revan's mind, and even though there had been no major developments between them after their fateful kiss while on Manaan, detente had been established. A cautious scaffold had been erected, but seeing now Bastila's furious intent to destroy at the behest of her new master, Revan struggled to convince himself that scaffold had not been torn down.

In the blink of an eye, Bastila channeled the energy of the Star Forge emanating from her command nexus and locked Jolee and Juhani into an impermeable stasis. She flew into action, bridging the distance between her and Revan with a mighty leap, bringing her crimson double-blade down on his green and blue ones as she landed.

Revan was immediately on the defensive. Bastila's raw fury and speed clashed with the former Dark Lord's wavering strength, driving him back inch by inch with every clash of their weapons. The fallen Jedi cut a wide sweep at neck level, and Revan only barely ducked and rolled back in time to avoid decapitation. From a crouching position, he prepared to charge forward with a renewed attack and a mighty Force push, but he was caught off-guard by a terrifying maelstrom of lightning emanating from Bastila's fingertips. Energy from the Star Forge almost visibly flowed into her form, being expelled in the form of a cacophonous Force storm.

Again, Revan just barely summoned up a block to deflect her attack, but even with all of the power he could muster, Bastila's sheer power fueled by the unfiltered fury and malevolence of the Star Forge rapidly began melting away his barrier. In seconds, the redeemed Dark Lord was blasted back, straight into the sealed blast door behind them. Smoke rose from his worn build, which lay unmoving save for brief jolts from the terrible electric shock he received.

In that moment, Bastila sheathed her lightsaber and put her hands on her hips triumphantly. "The strong shall always conquer the weak, Revan. It is a shame that you have so easily cast aside this lesson."

Pain. The purest, most biting, and most soul-crushing pain filled to capacity every last nerve of Revan's body. Each muscle jolted from the outrageous charge coursing through his system, briefly ceasing his control over his own motion. He managed to turn his head, just barely, and saw Bastila gloating from across the chamber. No. It couldn't end like this. There was no way he could abandon her. Surrender and death were not options, only success would be an acceptable outcome. Fighting back the typhoons of pain tearing across his nerves, Revan fought to regain control of his body.

She prepared to turn on her heels and return to her battle meditation, but she was interrupted by a bout of stirring from Revan's body. "What, ready for _more_? I'd be more than happy to oblige!" Just as she unsheathed her dual blade, Revan rose from his heap and covered the significant distance between them in but a second, experiencing a tremendous second wind.

Bastila successfully deflected Revan's first attack, but she was forced to take a step back. Feeling weakened from the exertion of blasting him with lightning, she ceased fighting for a brief moment and allowed the Star Forge to replenish her with its vast reservoirs of dark energy.

"I see now why Malak followed you. Even though you are a shell of your former self, you are a formidable opponent. I can't even _imagine _the power you must have wielded when you were the Dark Lord. You were a fool to give it up and follow the light." Bastila displayed obvious surprise and admiration for his recovery, albeit still with a twinge of spite and condescension.

Every moment Bastila tarried, Revan felt his faculties slowly return. Despite a long series of grueling battles leading up to the command deck and the punishing tide of the current duel, he felt newfound reserves of energy coursing through every last cell in his body. It was as if the Force itself was arming him to fight on. While Malak's apprentice gorged herself on the decaying, unsubstantial

raw strength of the Star Forge, Revan's body gradually recharged with a more refined vigor. A longer-lasting and deeper energy.

"The Dark Side has made me stronger than I ever was before! I have a mastery of the Force greater than all but the most powerful Jedi masters," Bastila raised both of her arms and released a torrent of lightning into the air above them, "As Malak teaches me the greatest secrets of the Sith, I will unlock more of my potential. Eventually, there will be no limit to what I can accomplish with the Force!"

"Malak will kill you before he ever lets you become that powerful."

"Have you forgotten the ways of the Sith already, Revan? Eventually I will challenge my Master. If I am worthy, he will die by my hand and I will be the new Sith Master. Then, I will take on my own apprentice and the cycle will begin is the way of the Sith, it is how we assure our leaders are the strongest and most worthy!"

Such serene confidence and belief in those words shook Revan to the core. Had she truly fallen past the point of redemption? "You're dooming yourself to an endless cycle of death and betrayal."

"No, Revan. It is you who are doomed." Revan recoiled in his mind at her stalwart declaration, but nonetheless charged forth to meet her next attack.

There was no visible difference in the ferocity and speed of Bastila's next attack and her first unrelenting barrage. She brought her blade to bear against the former Dark Lord in every possible way, probing him for any way past his beleaguered defenses. Her attacks were inspired further by a certain slowness in Revan's parries and counterattacks. Even if it was at a slow pace, she could see his energy being ground away by attrition, whereas she neither slowed nor faltered.

To Jolee and Juhani, relegated to silent, tense observation from across the chamber, Revan also seemed sluggish. However, this was not out of exhaustion alone. Behind the chaos of their duel, Revan's every action carried a special precision. No matter how quickly Bastila's cuts and slashes came, each attempt was unceremoniously rebuffed. The desperation in his movements had been abandoned, as if he intended to end the fight by other means.

Bastila launched a brilliant, flourishing maelstrom of strikes against Revan's defenses, and took the opportunity to quickly step back and pause the fight. She drew a sadistic satisfaction from the apparent degradation of her opponent's abilities.

"You are growing weary, I can sense it! Your strength falters, the light side is failing you while the power of the Star Forge re-energizes me! Soon this will all be over!" Malak's apprentice did not expect Revan to be as unfazed by the situation as he was, and her newfound dissatisfaction with the resoluteness of her opponent became obviously evident in her expression, adopting a poisonous snarl and furrowing her brows.

Revan felt his inner resolve returning to him. Something inside of her was breaking, wavering. The Dark Side's stranglehold over her was not as unshakeable as it first appeared. "I have not faltered, Bastila. You have been misled by the Dark Side."

"The Dark Side will always triumph over the light! Malak has assured me of victory! You can't defeat me here on the Star Forge! YOU CAN'T!" All of Bastila's pent up rage and frustration bubbled to the surface, mixing with the energies of the Star Forge to propel her forward in one last grand attempt to drive her stalwart opponent into the ground.

She rocketed forward, as if the blasts of energy coursing into her from the Star Forge were propelling her, slamming her blade down upon Revan's prepared defense. He had telegraphed her attack as soon as she had reared to launch. Bastila's once impeccable facade was showing cracks. She was getting sloppy.

Revan rejected blow after blow as each attack came with more furious and reckless abandon, allowing his opponent to exhaust herself with each failed attempt at shattering his dug-in defense. Revan lunged and sliced at eye-level, taking care that Bastila would still be able to dodge it even with her blind, offensive furor dragging down her performance.

Bastila ducked and sprung up, raising her blade in mid-air to slice down on Revan and end the fight once and for all. She had taken the bait.

It was over.

Revan raised his arm and summoned all of his power behind a mighty push that slammed into Bastila's core, throwing her far back into the command nexus with a sickening crunch and slam of flesh on metal. Her deactivated lightsaber rolled away and off the platform, leaving her completely defenseless. As her victorious opponent approached, she forced herself to rise and face him, clutching her pained side, sure to have suffered at least several broken bones.

"No… This is not possible! You have rejected the Dark Side, you are a weak and pathetic servant of the light! How can you still stand against me? Why can't I defeat you?" Bastila despaired at her own perceived inadequacy, and the fear of a painful death at the hands of the one who had so crushingly swept her aside and drained her of the will to carry on the fight any longer.

"Now you see the Dark Side is not stronger than the light." Revan maintained his staunch expression, but it pained him far greater than any blow Bastila could've physically inflicted to hear her full of such despair and hopelessness. Defeating her was the only path to saving her, but that didn't make the process any less torturous.

Her eyes fell as she hissed in pain. "Yes, I see you speak the truth. I am no match for you. Please, for the sake of what we once shared," Revan's eyes lit up, "do not make me suffer. End my life quickly. There is no other way."

His expression was soon drained of the faint hope it once had seconds before at Bastila's request. He could almost feel his heart sink in his chest. As he spoke, his determined expression faltered, exposing his shock and distress at her words. "I could never kill you, Bastila." It was a true statement, one that would have spelled doom for Revan had his tactics failed and forced him to choose between kill or be killed.

"What other choice do you have? I have fallen to the Dark Side, I am the apprentice to the Dark Lord himself. You cannot let me live."

"You can reject the Dark Side, Bastila. Return to the light."

Bastila grimly shook her head. "No… I'm not strong enough. There is too much anger inside me now. Too much hatred and fear. I can no longer find peace in the Force."

Revan did not reply. Instead, he took a step forward, and pressed his blue saber into his vanquished opponent's hands. Bastila squinted and raised a brow in abject puzzlement, and her mouth hung open slightly in surprise as Revan dropped unceremoniously to his knees.

"If that's true, Bastila, then end me now." A certain calmness and sincerity pervaded his tone, in stark contrast to his firmness and adamance during their duel. Whatever way out he had synthesized in his mind, it was apparent that any outcome would bring him an acceptable degree of peace.

"You wish for me to strike you down, when you have already won? I will not let you _mock _me!"

"No, Bastila. If you are truly a creature of the Dark Side now, I ask for you to strike me down. I fell in _love _with Bastila Shan, the confident, beautiful, and kind-hearted Jedi who fought with me to bring down Malak and the Sith, and that's the woman I've been fighting for ever since the _Leviathan_."

Bastila's eyes grew wide as saucers. Revan looked up and stared sadly into them, searching for any hint of the person trapped inside the cage of darkness Malak and the Star Forge had constructed within her.

"If the woman I love is truly dead, then I have lost my reason to live." Revan stated simply, as if declaring an inconsequential truth in life.

Bastila gingerly activated the lightsaber and brought it to Revan's throat. A single flick of the wrist would mean total victory for the Sith. The Republic's last hope for salvation against the encroaching hordes of glistening armor and red sabers on Coruscant would be extinguished forever. The history of the galaxy would be forever changed in one fell swoop.

It would be so easy. Total victory was mere inches away. But, in spite of all that, the burning voice of the darkness within Bastila, screaming for her to decapitate the sole threat to Malak's rule, was stifled by the cascade of emotions flooding every darkened nook and cranny of her heart. In Revan's eyes and through their bond, Bastila was overwhelmed by the uncompromising love and warmth flooding into her, washing away the demon within her which demanded so much blood.

Revan's lips curled into a slight smile as he heard the saber deactivate and drop the ground, clattering on the metal lattice floor. He rose to his feet, looking Bastila in the eyes with a soft, tender expression.

"You are brave… and some would say foolish. But you are also right. The Dark Side has not wholly consumed me. I cannot raise my blade against you." Bastila displayed a faint smile, satisfied with her decision. "You will go on to defeat Malak, of this I have little doubt. You will have gone from being the Sith Lord, himself, to the savior of our galaxy."

There was a pregnant pause before Bastila continued, as she collected herself for what she was about to say.

"And… and you said you loved me. It may not be the best time to say it, but… I love you too, with all my heart"

Almost immediately after the confession left her mouth, Revan wrapped his strong arms tightly around her wounded body, only just careful enough to avoid pressing on the injury he had inflicted. He pressed her smaller form against his own, savoring the elation of having his single ultimate desire united with him at last, snug against his chest, feeling her smooth, beautiful curves under worn Sith robes.

Bastila's eyes widened in shock as his lips crashed against hers, locking them in a passionate kiss. She let her eyes flutter shut and slowly maneuvered her arms around the former Dark Lord's neck. Frozen in time, in their loving embrace, the two redeemed Jedi let the world around them fall away. Both of them pulled themselves closer together, as if leaving any empty space between their bodies would allow the universe to separate them once more. Only for lack of oxygen did the two part, simply to bring their lips together once more, both Revan and Bastila eager to resume their exchange of passion. Revan groaned in satisfaction and fulfillment. Every last thought or feeling of affection became pure and clear in their bond, which so amplified their experience that the mere thought of pulling apart produced a faint stabbing pain in their chests.

Eventually, they broke their second kiss and Revan rested his head on Bastila's shoulder, refusing to loosen their embrace even the smallest amount.

"Bastila… Bastila… oh, Bastila..." Revan stroked her hair and muttered her name on end, "You aren't afraid to love anymore?"

Bastila pulled back just enough so that the two of them were able to look each other in the eye. "After this? No, nothing could make me feel safer than to be loved by you." Revan stroked the side of her face and sighed, still grinning. The inferno that had blazed in Revan's heart for the last several weeks, longing and desperation its fuel, was finally quenched. In its place rose a new flame, softer and warmer, drawing from a fierce and immense instinctive urge to never again allow harm to befall Bastila. _His _Bastila. Against a backdrop of a galaxy at war, in love he had finally found his own personal peace. But the job was not yet finished. Both Revan and Bastila knew it, but neither wished to be the first to admit it.

"You should go. Malak awaits. This isn't over yet… for any of us. I should stay here, though. If we face Malak I am afraid his dark presence will overwhelm me. It would not be wise to expose myself to such temptation." Bastila was the first to break, and with a heavy heart she expressed the cruel reality of the moment.

Revan let his hands rest on Bastila's shoulders as he took a few steps back. "I want you by my side when Malak is finally defeated. We'll end this war together."

"I'm sorry, but the risk is too great. I am not wholly free of the Dark Side's shadow. Not yet. But you are more than a match for the Dark Lord. I understand that now," Bastila's expression softened as she sighed, noting her love's forlorn reaction, even with reluctant agreement, "I must stay here and aid the Republic fleet to destroy this station. Malak is your fight."

The former Sith smiled a bittersweet smile, and cast his gaze downward. "Of course, Bastila. Of course…" Revan traced the source of the greatest and final font of dark energy on the station past a mighty blast door, staring through them at his final destiny. "I will return victorious. For the Republic, and for _us_. I swear it." He stepped towards the unlocked doors, looking over his shoulder one final time as Bastila prepared to enter a meditative state on the deck.

"I love you, Bastila."

"I love you too, Revan. May the Force be with you."

It was then that Revan understood his victory was inevitable. Never could he allow himself to abandon she who he loved so dearly a second time.

Seconds became minutes as quickly as minutes began to feel like hours and days when in the truest heat of Battle Meditation. Each round of gunfire dispatching a Sith cruiser to its ultimate fate felt like a surge of stimulant rushing through her blood. Every Sith casualty stoked the flame of her Force energy sustaining the crucial power, and every Republic casualty starved it ever so slightly of its precious fortitude. But as Bastila fell deeper and deeper into her trance, intertwining what strength in the Force remained after so much exertion with every tendril and tide of the battle which so furiously raged on around the station, the flame grew to demand more battle, more chaos. Battle Meditation, for all its professed significance as a miracle of the Force, remained immensely difficult to wield, let alone control.

One peculiar side-effect of Battle Meditation was the practitioner's inability to maintain even the most basic passive mental blocks; any observing Jedi or Sith could merely opt to enter their mind and find the gates to the practitioner's most vulnerable thoughts and feelings wide open. Juhani and Jolee were well aware of this fact. Freed from their imprisonment, they gently probed Malak's former apprentice for any duplicity in her redemption. To their mutual relief and satisfaction, her every word was genuine.

But how Revan had so quickly reached Bastila to save her from the dark was an object of immediate curiosity. Malak's hold over her was certainly tenuous with its shaky foundation and lack of maturity, but even the freshest of Malak's converts captured by Republic forces took many days to coax out even a basic admission of their error.

"Revan and Bastila spoke of love, one which I felt at the end of their encounter, but never before." Juhani plainly stated, looking to Jolee for any insight on this revelation.

"We talked about love a handful of times during our journey. Revan and I, that is. I had a feeling something was on between those stupid kids, but it seems they were too sneaky for us to notice," The old man stroked the furs of his carefully-managed beard in thought, "Bastila was, at least. Revan wouldn't hide romantic feelings if it were up to him alone. Either she was embarrassed and ashamed to love her enemy, or this is more complex than it seems."

The Cathar shook her head. "Bastila will never again be the Jedi she was when she boarded the _Endar Spire_, and she will never be the grand paragon of Jedi values." She glanced at Jolee when she heard him snort.

"You're sharper than that, Juhani. Neither of them want to be good Jedi, and if they haven't figured that out yet, they'll be damn sure of it when the dust from this war settles."

The battle was soon felt to be at a close by all those left alive on the Star Forge. Its impending demise was informed through a series of skull-rattling shockwaves emanating from the upper decks; the Republic fleet had managed to destroy the vast factory's orbital stabilizers. In mere minutes, it would plunge into the star it fed off of for centuries on end, releasing it from its unseen, undetected slavery to the Dark Side. Juhani bolted to Bastila's side, shaking her to draw her out of her trance.

"It's done. We must leave, lest we die here." She pulled Bastila up by the arm, but the redeemed Jedi did not budge once standing.

"I feel him. He's close, Juhani. We just have to wait."

The Cathar tensed, and her face shifted uncomfortably, but Bastila's insistent declaration could by no means be contested. For the man that had risked everything for his crew and the Republic, they could surely risk their lives for him.

Revan soon emerged from the observation deck, passing through the now-malfunctioning security doors. He favored his right leg, occasionally taking advantage of the walls to stay on his feet. His right arm traced the steel hull for balance, while his left clutched at his chest, the arm of his robe visibly saturated with blood.

"He's dead," Revan growled, "but he had backup. Droids." A rough bout of coughing interrupted him. Blood was mixed with saliva, and his convulsions nearly brought him to his knees. "Lots of droids. We need to… need to…"

Bastila's jaw swung open in horror. She sprinted to his side moments after he collapsed into unconsciousness, briskly inspecting each and every wound and assessing his general health. Wordlessly, she lifted his limp body with the Force.

"Go. _Go_. Clear a path ahead." Bastila ordered succinctly, desperation cascading over each word. Sweat soon flooded her brow. Her heart threatened to leap from her chest, as icy spears of horror thrust into every corner of her mind. While Jolee and Juhani cleared the way ahead, shoving aside debris and eliminating any Sith stragglers, Bastila's attention remained entirely focused on Revan's terribly wounded visage. Even before their duel, he bore the appearance of a man who had truly been through hell. Further exhausted and wounded after fighting her, he just barely survived against Malak at his peak strength, supported by Force knows how many specialized assault droids.

Wounds covered the entirety of his body, in the form of deep cuts, burns, and ugly bruises. Such wounds would surely bring down any normal man, but Revan was no normal man.

Even with this knowledge, the dirtiest and most repulsive fear asserted itself in the pit of her stomach. The fear that her love would be lost, so soon after they truly first began to love.

Bastila cast away loose hazel strands from her face in panic. While following Jolee and Juhani back to the _Ebon Hawk_, she used her last reserves of strength to heal whatever wounds she could. Some minor cuts and bruises were eliminated, but the gravest of all his injuries remained, past her current faculties to remedy. A vast, extended slice diagonally across his torso, sanitized only by the salt of a thick sheen of sweat. Blood had stopped oozing from the wound, but the possibility that too much blood had already been lost nagged at the back of Bastila's mind.

"Bastila, quick! Get on board, get him to the sick bay!" Carth hollered from the boarding ramp of their ship, drawing Bastila from her fearful stupor. Jolee and Juhani scampered aboard ahead of her, gesturing for her to follow.

The redeemed Jedi trundled up the ramp as the crushing weight of exhaustion finally weighed on her, slowing her every move and weakening her grip on Revan's body with the Force. Jolee promptly took over and hauled Revan to the sick bay. The woman collapsed on the cold, metal deck just as the door behind her began to seal. Exhaustion. Nothing but pure exhaustion on an unparalleled scale. Bastila blinked once, then twice, and drifted to sleep before she could open her eyes a third time.

She awoke in her bunk. No longer did she wear the gray robes of a Sith apprentice. Someone must've changed her into her old clothes while she was asleep. They hadn't washed her, apparently. Nor had they tended to her likely fractures. Hopefully it was Juhani. Mission was too young, and all the others were men. Naturally, Canderous would be the worst of them all. She'd have to ask later. Lightning bolts of pain rode the contours of her skin to molest every nerve in her body. Hissing, she called upon the Force to numb the pain, at least for a while. Not knowing their location, nor the time or situation, she rolled out of the bunk.

It must've been at least half an hour she spent in the refresher, washing away the blood, sweat, and the general musk of exhausting battle. She sorted her hair into their twin braids and donned a fresh set of Jedi robes, as the clothes she'd slept in now reeked as badly as she had when she first stumbled aboard.

She stood in the doorway of the sick bay. At least a third of Revan's body was encased in kolto-soaked bandages. A mask aided his breathing, which was executed laboriously with a sick wheeze, in and out. His eyes were clamped shut in a deep sleep, and quite likely a painful one. How he suffered, and how she could not relieve it. However many hours of sleep she had seized were only just enough to keep her on her feet; her Force strength at the moment was laughably impotent.

"Hey." Carth greeted her simply, joining her in observing the former Dark Lord. "Trust me, looking will just stress you out more. Come on, let's talk. There's something you ought to know about." The Republic pilot turned on his heels and walked off towards the cockpit. Bastila followed suit, albeit slowly.

Carth allowed himself to sink into the pilot's seat, which was never occupied by anyone but himself. Bastila sat down rather uncomfortably in the co-pilot's seat, resting at the edge with her hands folded on her knees.

"He cares about you, you know." Carth stated simply. In any normal situation, Bastila would've laughed at the idea that she would be in the dark about Revan's feelings, but in this case she could bring herself to do little more than nod meekly.

"He loves me. That's how he saved me, Carth. It's how he saved us all."

"It's not just that. I mean, yeah, that's _huge_ and from that it's obvious he really loves you, but there's a bit _more_ to it."

This piqued Bastila's interest. Her eyes rose ever so slightly, and her back stiffened. "How do you mean?"

"Back when you first got captured, you heard him pounding on the security doors. We _all_ heard him yell. But even after we fled the _Leviathan_, it was obvious that something in him had… changed." Outside the cockpit, the _Ebon Hawk_ was surrounded by dozens of Republic vessels, each of them sending down a number of shuttles to the surface of Rakata. "He didn't talk anymore. Of course, for damn sure he'd change after learning that Coriff Bencke wasn't real and that he was actually the Dark Lord, but-... but this was different."

Bastila shook her head in disappointment. Faint tones of regret stained her words. "I would be shocked if he didn't die a little on the inside. He has every right to hate us."

"But he didn't _hate_ us. He didn't _die_ inside. He stopped talking about saving the galaxy, or the Republic. When we ended up going to Korriban after searching the ruins on Dantooine, he essentially told us that the plan was the find the last map so that we could go out and save you. Not the Republic and every last man, woman, and child in it. _You_."

Bastila opened her mouth, but not a single word emerged.

"I had my suspicions that something went on between you two, and I figure most of the crew did, too. This was a surprise, though." Carth gazed wistfully at the fleet. He wrung his hands, taking his time to pick the right words. "He never blamed you or was angry at you. He was angry at Malak for capturing you and angry at _himself_ for letting it happen. And not a damn thing in the whole galaxy could stop him from finding you, Bastila. Nothing else mattered. He was like the inverse of Saul Karath…"

"For the longest time I held him at bay. I couldn't… feel for the Dark Lord. He was an evil man at heart. And then he wasn't evil."

"We were all wrong about him in our own ways. It's funny. In the end, a man who forgot his entire identity had the most to teach us."

Bastila rose from her seat and stalked out for the sick bay. "I'm going to be there when he wakes up, and we'll never be apart again."

In how Revan and Bastila acted and felt, so honestly and purely, it let a little smirk grace Carth's face. He hailed the RNS _Coruscant_, paging for the admiral.

"Carth, what's wrong? Why are you not yet on the surface?"

"We'll be there soon, Admiral. I just had to ask, how much weight do you think you hold with the Jedi Council nowadays?"


End file.
